In which we walk slightly less than we did the last two days, which is a good thing, since my feet are getting all sore. Another day, but this one a cooler wetter one than the previous day. A brunch, a meeting with the renowned artist, dinner with the soon-to-be-departed, bedtime.
I don’t want to have to go through it all in gory detail. Not that it was gory, although some of the details are. Anyway, the whole thing added up to be the capper on the whole sequence of reminders of the transitory nature of life, the fleetfootedness of felicity, and the eventual passing of all that we revere and cherish. Not that we didn’t know all of that already, but the occasional constellation of reminders helps to keep the message fresh. So a marriage crumbles, an old man becomes more physically decrepit, and one family moves away from its friends. Nothing terribly earth-shaking, but the cumulative effect was melancholic and at the same time actually not a bad experience — it was good to be witnessing these changes and to be there with the ones undergoing them. Noble friendship, which sounds really high-falutin’ but that’s what it is: consciously aiming to be present with people as fully and as often as possible. But oh how hard it is to do that, because (let’s not kid ourselves) people can sometimes be hard to deal with.
I seem to have strayed from my main point. To recap: life is brief.
